French intonation: Tone or tune?

Abstract

The question of whether to analyse the intonation of a particular language in terms of tune or tone has been extensively discussed for English; recent accounts include Gibbon (1976: 101–92), Ladd (1980: 14–16), Cruttenden (1986: 55–8) and Couper-Kuhlen (1986: 67–72). It cannot, for all that, be said to be resolved. When it comes to French, however, the question has scarcely been aired at all, although Crompton (1980) does discuss the related question of ‘configurations’ versus levels versus tonetic stress marks (the latter surely an unlikely candidate for annotating the intonation of a language without lexical stress).